To begin ...

As the twentieth century fades out
the nineteenth begins
.......................................again
it is as if nothing happened
though those who lived it thought
that everything was happening
enough to name a world for & a time
to hold it in your hand
unlimited.......the last delusion
like the perfect mask of death

Sunday, July 22, 2012

Outsider Poems: A Mini-Anthology in Progress (42): from Theragāthā and Therīgāthā (Pali, 1st century B.C.)

please
note. a list of postings after january 12, 2012 can be foundhereTranslations by Andrew Schelling
& Anne Waldman

[editor’s note.The following – all but the commentary
– comes from selections & translations assembled by Schelling & Waldman
that give a sometimes startling view of the poetry created by the early
Buddhist outsiders/outriders whose homelessness & wanderings might later
serve as a template for the uses of a poetry outside of poetry as such. The link here between experience & poetic form
is a marker of outsider poetry as we’ve come to know it in our quest for a
vehicle, a book, to bring it all together.(J.R.)]

mahakala speaks

This lady
who cremates the dead

black as
a crow –

she takes
an old corpse and breaks off a thighbone,

takes an
old corpse and breaks off a forearm,

cracks an
old skull and sets it out

like a
bowl of milk

for me to
look at

Witless
brain don’t you get it –

whatever
you do just

ends up
here

Get
finished with karma, finished with rebirth –

no more
bones of mine

on the
slag heap

kassapa the great

I came
down from my

mountain
hut

into the
streets one day

to beg
food

I stopped
where a leper

was
feeding himself

With his
rotted leper’s hand

into my
bowl

he threw
a scrap

into my
bowl as he

threw it

one of
his fingers broke and also fell

I simply
leaned against a wall

and ate

Taking
whatever scraps

are tossed

finding
medicine

in cow
dung

sleeping

beneath a
tree and wrapped in

tattered
robes –

only a
man like that

walks
free in all the four

directions

only a
man like that

walks
free

uppalavanna

Uppalavanna
was stunning.She had skin the color of
the heart of the blue lotus.“Give us
your daughter,” everyone begged of her father.But Uppalavanna rencounced the world.She repeated the verses she’d heard:

Out of my mind / deranged with
love of my lost son / Out of my senses / Naked – hair disheveled / I wandered
here, there / I lived on rubbish heaps / in a cemetery, on a highway / I
wandered three years in hunger and thirst / Then I saw the Buddha / gone to
Mithila / I paid homage / He pitied me / and taught me the Dharma / I went
forth into the homeless state (spoken by Vasitthi)

It’s the
deliberate outsiderness, then, that marks them, a move into the margins,
mirrored across millennia & continents by self-elected saints &
poets.For those whose songs were later
written down, the goal was a shared homelessness or else a refuge in the
old/new wilderness, “to live as wanderers and seekers … in caves or woodland
huts.”With that came – as it would for
others, elsewhere – a turning to the common language, Pali in the present
instance as a deliberately constructed counter to hieratic Sanskrit, & with
that a new poetics as the sign of a new life.

Since their first gathering, the
poems have been divided into two segments or books – the Theragāthā as songs (gāthā)
of the early male followers of Buddha & the Therīgāthā as those of his early female followers.To the songs themselves, arranged from
shortest to longest, the ancient anthologizers added short prose narratives,
written with an earthiness & matter-of-factness much like that of the songs
they put in context.What comes across,
with little interference, is a mixture of hope & terror / terror &
hope, that we might take for ourselves as the mark of all great poetry.The
terror, then, in the following:

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A PROSPECTUS

In this age of internet and blog the possibility opens of a free circulation of works (poems and poetics in the present instance) outside of any commercial or academic nexus. I will therefore be posting work of my own, both new & old, that may otherwise be difficult or impossible to access, and I will also, from time to time, post work by others who have been close to me, in the manner of a freewheeling on-line anthology or magazine. I take this to be in the tradition of autonomous publication by poets, going back to Blake and Whitman and Dickinson, among numerous others.

[For a complete checklist of previous postings through January 12, 2012, see below. The slot at the upper left can also be used for specific items or subjects. More recent posts are updated regularly here.]